Chapter 3: Planting Seed

Belle looked up as we entered the kitchen, Audrey still leaning heavily on my arm.

“Ralph!” Belle muttered, loading that single word with such loathing and contempt that I would not have been surprised to hear that the guy had dropped down dead as she said it.

She crossed the room in a few strides, taking my place beside the younger woman, steering her towards the door. As she went, she instructed me to turn the heat off under the soup when it boiled and to remove the bread from the oven when the timer ‘pinged’, indicating the mesh tray on the work surface, waiting to receive the loaf.

I was sitting eating soup and hot bread when she returned, but she stayed just long enough to fill another bowl with soup to take to Audrey. She reminded me that there was ham and cheese in the fridge if I wanted to make myself a sandwich, but I was content with what I had, especially as I had done no work all morning.

After lunch the ground was still too heavy for the rotovator, so I turned my attention to the fruit bushes. Some of them, particularly the raspberry canes, were overdue for replacement, although I thought that we could salvage something. Within minutes, I was lost in my work, when a pleasant contralto voice asked me what I was doing. I turned to find Audrey smiling at me.

“Thank you for helping me this morning.”

“Always happy to help a damsel in distress.”

“Some damsel, some distress,” she laughed. “I’ve treated you like shit since Belle brought you here and you reacted with kindness and consideration. I’ve treated men with disdain all my life and now that bastard Ralph has paid me with my own coin. I’ll tell you the tale some time, if you’re interested.”

I had carried on trimming the excess growth from the bushes while she talked, but now I stopped and told her again that I had done no more than any man would do for an unhappy woman. She was watching my hands as I spoke and now, she asked what I was hoping to achieve. I began to give the short answer to an idle query, but she really wanted to know what I was doing.

“When I was a little girl, these bushes always seemed to be laden with fruit.”

“Surely not in January!” We both laughed, and I felt that we had become friends.

Five minutes later, she was holding the secateurs pruning the bushes under my direction. Ten minutes after that, I excused myself and left her to it while I got shears and a sickle to set about clearing the weeds that were filling the ground between the bushes. We worked on until dark while she told her tale. When we finally straightened our backs, she could not believe how much we had done. I let her return to the house alone while I tidied away the tools and checked the temperature in the greenhouse. A little extra warmth would encourage the seeds to germinate.

Belle had gone off after lunch to check on Cherry manning her stall; she had stepped in near the end of the day to help deal with a flurry of business when one of the other vegetable stalls ran out of green vegetables. They had brought back pizza which we quickly ate before Cherry went upstairs for a bath. Audrey had joined us dressed in a bath robe and she went upstairs with Cherry, chatting about her afternoon pruning fruit bushes.

“You missed your morning tea,” Belle said as soon as we were alone.

“I was detained at gun point when I crossed the little bridge to have a look around the wood.”

“Maurice! Did he actually point the gun at you, Bill? The local police sergeant warned him he could lose his gun licence if he did that again.”

Last summer a young couple had stopped in a lay-by to let their dog have a toilet break. The mutt headed off through the trees and the pair, following behind, were confronted by an enraged Maurice brandishing his shotgun. He continued to threaten them all the way back to their car where, fortunately, the dog had already returned, watching the action through the open back door of the vehicle. The couple drove straight to the police station to make a formal complaint.

I was thinking that there did not seem to be anything in the wood that merited an armed guard when I remembered something that Maurice had said as he marched me out of his domain.

“You know, Belle, it’s going to cost you more to fence off the adventure playground than to make it safe for use.”

“Maurice!” she repeated. “I have no intention of fencing off the playground. Maurice gets angry at the kids running back and forward between the fort and the chalets, but I’ve made it crystal clear that it is an essential amenity – it is featured in our brochure, for God’s sake!”

“I know a guy that would check it and issue a safety certificate, if you want.”

“Where have you been all my life, Bill? Don’t remind me that you weren’t born for the first half of it!”

She made fresh coffee, and we sat at the kitchen table, idly chatting about nothing in particular. She yawned and excused herself, remarking that helping Cherry on the stall was too much like hard work.

“It’s the first promise she has ever kept, and I want her to know how much I appreciate it.” She saw my raised eyebrows and continued. “When there was all the fuss over Geoff, Cherry felt responsible. Even she could see that it knocked the stuffing out of Claude – he never really recovered from it. She promised to sell the produce that no longer went to the shops and that’s when she began running the market stall. Now she does three days a week in winter and an extra day in summer – plus the occasional farmers’ market or country fair.”

I wanted to know where Darrin fitted in, but she brushed off my questions about him.

The next morning began as usual, the first change coming when Audrey remained seated when I arrived, looking up at me with a friendly smile.

“Can I help in the garden today, Bill? It was so satisfying to see order where there had been all those weeds and twisted branches.”

I was planning to make an anodyne, generic promise that promised nothing concrete, but there was something in her eyes that made me want to dig a little deeper. She had been glancing at Belle cooking my breakfast, so I guessed that now was not the time.

“If you want to join the team, come and have tea with us at eleven. I can’t do much before then anyway.”

Audrey smiled again, rose and left the room with her coffee cup in hand. The entire exchange lasted less than a minute. The next change that morning was that Belle brought a coffee and sat with me while I ate. On other mornings she had made a point of cleaning the grill while it was hot and easier to deal with.

“Ralph was using her,” she began, jerking her thumb at the door just closing behind Audrey. “He wanted me to transfer all my legal business to his firm and dumped her when I told him I was happy with Claude’s solicitors.” She made no effort to lower her voice, and I wondered if she was using me to give Audrey a message.

I prepared the tools I intended to use that day under the electric lights in the stable yard but, as soon as the daylight was strong enough, I went to the gap in the wall and gazed over the main field, lost in thought. By the time I turned into the greenhouse for morning tea, I had the year planned out in my head.

While I had been idling, Belle had made biscuits. We had to move the meeting into the greenhouse proper since we were too many for the little office. When I joined them, Audrey was telling them of her fulfilling day trimming fruit bushes. Cherry said she needed help in the greenhouse, and Audrey admitted that her father had banned her from working there because she was so clumsy.

“Christine and I each had a little garden of our own, but she was the only one allowed to collect seedlings from the greenhouse! Thankfully, I discovered horses when I was about ten, and that was the end of my gardening career!”

“You did well with the soft fruits yesterday. Perhaps it’s genetic.” I turned to Cherry: “So, no help there for you, but remember that Angie and I will do what you tell us. You’re in charge in here.”

“Where does that leave me,” Angie laughed. “Cherry is boss of the greenhouse, Audrey boss of soft fruits; I’m just the hired labour.”

“You bring us the seeds we need; without you we’d all be idle. Talking of that, I need seed potatoes – a lot of seed potatoes!”

The square plot where Cherry grew vegetables for her market stall was about an acre in size. I always plan gardens in acres because a hectare is too big. That left five or six acres that I had roughly ploughed, and I had decided to fill them with spuds. There would be early potatoes from the cultivated ground to the stream and main crop in the remainder. Cherry complained that she would never be able to sell that quantity on her market stall, so I looked Belle in the eye and explained further.

“The more I look at the market garden, the more convinced I am that Claude planned eventually to go organic. The weeds I’ve ploughed into ground that has lain fallow is all the fertilizer needed for spuds. We can discuss later in the year the pros and cons of organic farming, but planting potatoes leaves our options open. We can always sell them to a potato merchant as a crop in the field.”

I was watching Belle closely as I spoke: the last time I mentioned organic farming she had rushed out the room. This time she was smiling, but with a far-away look in her eyes.

“It was Claude’s ambition to go organic, a sort of dream that he didn’t dare commit to paper. He only ever talked about it to me. Thank you, Bill.”

She collected the cups onto a tray and left, a dignified lady.

“What now, boss?” Angie asked after a brief silence.

“Are you asking the boss of the greenhouse, or the boss of the soft fruits?” That earned me a punch on the arm from Cherry, who was nearest to me.

Cherry and her twin remained in the glass house while Audrey and I went into the kitchen garden. There had been a fresh wind that had dried the surface sufficiently to let us rake the beds I had previously rotovated. I worked alongside my partner and, as on the day before, she proved adept and a quick learner. She completed the story of her life that she had begun when we were working on the fruit bushes. At first, her memories of the garden were tinged with bitterness, but as she remembered, her attitude visibly mellowed. There was no sign of her advertised clumsiness.

“I had forgotten how happy we were,” she concluded as we tidied away our tools before joining the others in the greenhouse. “Until mother became ill, my childhood was idyllic.””

Cherry and Angie had loaded the van for the market next day. Belle and the twins will travel together with Cherry serving the public, Angie ordering the seeds we need and Belle setting up a bank account for the market garden. They wanted me to join them, but I begged off, saying I wanted to work outdoors while the weather was suitable. The truth was that I did not want to be seen or to leave a paper trail for Hazel. I was in no hurry to divorce her, but I was certain that she would seek me out if she found that her new life was not all she had hoped; reliability is not the strongest suit of Charles Junior.

When I got into the kitchen, Belle was alone, dinner looking after itself in the oven while she sat at the table with a glass of wine. She waved me down beside her. Audrey had been feeling stiff after her hard work, so she had gone upstairs to soak in a bath. Cherry had gone with her, presumably to give her friend some of the same magical bath oil she had given me. I spent the next twenty minutes looking like an idiot.

My success as a landscape gardener was largely due to my skill in designing a garden that blended in with the wider area surrounding it. It was purely instinctive, and I rarely thought about it, except when a customer would ask why I had chosen a particular plant or feature and all I could say was that it looked right. I frequently felt like a country bumpkin, seeking for words to describe an intuitive decision.

Belle had been most impressed that I had uncovered Claude’s deep secret to make his market garden fully organic. She wanted to know, reasonably enough, what I had seen or heard that gave me the clue. I tried really hard to find an answer but the best I could do was to ramble on about the siting of the garden, the choice of tools and an atmosphere about the place. When I mentioned that, she leaned across and took my hands in hers.

“I don’t understand a word of that, but you sound just like Claude when he talked about it. Maybe It’s a man thing.” Or maybe the old man is smiling down on us, nodding his approval.

She got up to serve the dinner. The girls joined us, both in dressing gowns, for a relaxed meal seasoned with laughter. We opted for wine rather than coffee after the table had been cleared but none of us was in any rush to leave. Belle mentioned that Maurice had held me up at gunpoint and that led Audrey to tell us that he was not the first in their history to do so, at least according to the family stories she had heard.

I had pictured the five unmarried daughters of the Victorian farmer as unattractive, left on the shelf because they lacked the qualities that would entice a husband. Nothing, Audrey told us, could be further from the truth. They were beauties, popular with all the swains in the neighbourhood but, in the rigid society of the time, they fell between stools – or social classes, I should say.

Their father, a rich yeoman farmer, had the money to give his daughters all the trappings of ladies. They were fashionably dressed, and they had the finest of everything from dancing masters to horses. They were first on the guest list for balls and other society functions, and never off the dance floor when they attended. In the hunting field they were bold and mounted on horses that could tackle any obstacle as they pursued the fox. Many a young man came a cropper trying to follow the girls over a wall or thickset hedge.

They spent their evenings in the company of the gentry but, when it came to marriage, the fathers of the swains stepped in to steer their offspring towards more noble blood. The young men expressed their heartfelt sorrow but were unable to oppose the wishes of their fathers who held the purse strings. Only two of the seven daughters faced this reality, settling for marriage with the sons of neighbouring farmers. That might have been the sad end of the story if it had been written by Jane Austen, but the blood of the girls and their suitors was too hot to be thwarted in this way.

The little wood where Maurice had accosted me became the trysting place of the girls. The remains of the garden seat I had spotted marked one of several clearings where the girls were wooed. The young ladies set off arm in arm, no doubt twirling parasols, followed by maids laden with picnic hampers. Once across the bridge, a young man would take the place of a sister by the side of the maiden, and they would make for the secluded seats.

It can be little surprise that they did not long remain maidens. Every so often their mother would detect a certain peakiness in a daughter, insisting that her husband send the girl to her aunt in Bath. These visits lasted in excess of six months. Father remained in ignorance of what was really happening until late in his life. One of his sons had gone to Australia and the other two had no surviving sons of their own. It was at that stage, that the old farmer’s wife introduced a strapping young lad as the illegitimate son of one of his five supposedly virgin daughters.

After the initial shock, the old man warmed to the young man, leaving the entire farm to him, with the condition that he cared for his mother and four aunts for the remainder of their lives. Claude was the direct descendent of the cuckoo. They never did learn which member of the nobility contributed to his bloodline. Audrey admitted that she had had her DNA checked - and had collected samples from the hairbrushes of certain lovers, looking for her ancestors’ legitimate progeny.

The young man married a distant cousin and went on to have three sons of his own. In 1914, the eldest son remained at home running the farm while his two brothers saw service in the trenches. The youngest boy was killed in action and the older brother died in a hunting accident in 1918. The middle boy survived, being released early by the army to take control of the farm. The problem was that he brought back with him a French wife.

His mother, despite being married to an acknowledged bastard, disapproved of this match. No one, she insisted, knew anything about the family of the pretty young foreign woman. They certainly could not share a house, so a dower house was built on the far side of the wood where her husband had been conceived. Irony was not her strong suit, however, so she sulked in her new home before dying a bitter old woman.

We were still laughing at Audrey’s checkered forebears, none louder than her, when a thought crossed my mind.

“Are there stables at the dower house?”

It had occurred to me that offering riding lessons to the people who rented chalets might be profitable. Audrey picked up the idea at once.

“We could clear the old tracks through the woods, put mounting blocks and seats back in the clearings. Perhaps name each one after one of the great aunts. Adults could ride to romantic picnics while I led the kids round the tracks. We could even have advanced trails where they learned to hop over fallen logs. If it went well, we could have a few proper jumps. Can we try it, Belle?”

“No promises, but give me a costing,” she smiled.

Then Cherry got a fit of the giggles and we all had to wait until she recovered the power of speech. “I was just imagining how Maurice is going to react when everyone’s tramping through his precious woods!”

The next morning Audrey and I were left alone at the breakfast table after Belle and the twins set off to town. I had stuck my head outside the door to find that the drying wind was still blowing. Sitting nursing my coffee, I hardly noticed my companion until she rose with a loud groan.

“I don’t know how much good I’ll be today, Bill. I’m stiff as a board after yesterday.”

I told her that I was not surprised considering the effort she had put in, which pleased her. “Why don’t you take the day off and work on that idea for giving riding lessons.”

I am not sure if it was the drying effect of the wind or if I had struck an easier patch of ground, but I made great progress with the rotovator, completing the whole kitchen garden before the light failed. Audrey brought out tea at eleven begging me to stop her letting her grandiose ideas run away with her. I asked if she knew how many children visited the chalets, and she shook her head, her shoulders slumping for a moment.

“Chris will know!” she exclaimed, brightening up. “Unlike her mad husband, she likes kids.” Neither of us knew that her call to her sister knocked over the first domino.

At lunch time we talked more about her scheme. She had called Christine and an old school friend who owned a riding school in the next village. Her grand ideas had shrunk almost to invisibility. She would lease four ponies suitable for children up to the age of about fifteen; during the summer there were eight or ten children on site at any time and she thought that she would be doing well if half of them participated. When I gently questioned her, she admitted that her sister had thrown cold water on the idea, particularly of the adults riding through the woods to a romantic picnic spot.

“Why don’t we let the adults walk at first?” I suggested. “After all, it’s more romantic walking hand in hand through the woods to a moonlit clearing. Then it doesn’t have to be a picnic. We could set up a table and chairs, white cloth, candles, romantic music from speakers hidden in the trees. Waitress service under the stars with the one you love – what could be better?”

“I’m an expert at shouting at waitresses,” she laughed. “Seriously, Bill, we’d need a bit of help with that.”

“It just so happens that I know a man whose daughter is an expert waitress – Belle knows her.”

Audrey’s confidence had been restored by the time I went back to work. Now I was getting to know her better, I was really beginning to like her; in many ways we seemed to be on the same page. That thought led me to realise that I also liked Cherry and Angie, adding to my previous high regard for Belle. I was reminding myself that the first impression I had of all four women was that they were thorough bitches, when Graham appeared in the gap in the wall. I assumed that he was passing through, but he stopped in front of me, impatiently waving his arms until I stopped the rotovator.